Illustrative embodiments pertain to the art of turbomachinery, and specifically to turbine rotor components.
Gas turbine engines are rotary-type combustion turbine engines built around a power core made up of a compressor, combustor and turbine, arranged in flow series with an upstream inlet and downstream exhaust. The compressor compresses air from the inlet, which is mixed with fuel in the combustor and ignited to generate hot combustion gas. The turbine extracts energy from the expanding combustion gas, and drives the compressor via a common shaft. Energy is delivered in the form of rotational energy in the shaft, reactive thrust from the exhaust, or both.
The individual compressor and turbine sections in each spool are subdivided into a number of stages, which are formed of alternating rows of rotor blade and stator vane airfoils. The airfoils are shaped to turn, accelerate and compress the working fluid flow, or to generate lift for conversion to rotational energy in the turbine.
Airfoils may incorporate various cooling cavities located adjacent external side walls. Such cooling cavities are subject to both hot material walls (exterior or external) and cold material walls (interior or internal). Although such cavities are designed for cooling portions of airfoil bodies, local internal cooling flow characteristics may result in localized hot spot metal regions where the incorporation of various convective and film cooling design concepts may be limiting and/or non-optimal due to restrictions associated with conventional core tooling and casting manufacturing processes that prohibit more robust and optimal cooling configurations to be integrated into current state-of-the-art cooling concepts. In order to mitigate the inherent variability associated with conventional vane baffle impingement-film cooling design concepts it becomes desirable to design cooling concepts that enable more robust approaches to tailoring and optimizing thermal cooling requirements based on the local distribution of external heatload. Accordingly, improved means for providing cooling within an airfoil may be desirable.